Okay, for today's little lesson, I'm going to be sending you to another site.  Yeah, really.  I want you to go here, look it over, and then come back.  No worries, we'll be right here when you return. 

Okay, for those of you who are convinced, you can just skip the next sentence.  For those of you who still think Comic Sans is a whimsical, cute font, read this, then meet me after the jump.

Okay, for those who have been completely mezmerized by the above picture, those are probably the Comic Sans folks.  We can ignore them.  The rest of you, please follow me.

Still with me?  Good.  Comic Sans, for all of Microsoft's intentions (and they were, contrary to belief, good, noble intentions) has been taken places it should never have gone.  While we could sit here all day debating the merits of why it shouldn't be allowed anywhere on the planet, one place that it should never be at all is webcomics.

There are a number of reasons for this.  The first, and most obvious, is that becausse Comic Sans has been so horrifically abused, any use of it – any use - will automatically mark you as an unprofessional.  It's been that corrupted.  But even aside from that, there are other, more practical reasons as well.

The second, and the most critical reason, is that Comic Sans does not kern properly.  For those of you not familiar, kerning is the space between the letters; it's the reason why the V and the A match so well together.  Don't confuse kerning with tracking. Tracking is the distance between the letters; kerning is how they fit.

In any case, Comic Sans was written as a monospace font, which means that there is no kerning between the letters and thus looks uneven.  Although later versions of Comic Sans (the versions that come with Vista and Win 7) do have kerning, it's still very uneven and almost applied as an afterthought.

The third reason is that while most fonts come with standardized ASCII characters, specific comic fonts come with little specials that Comic Sans, ironically, does not.  Breath marks (distinct from their musical counterparts) are common in most specialty made comic fonts, but not in Comic Sans, as the creator of the font, Vincent Connare, designed it to be a inspiration of comic book lettering (specifically the lettering of artist Dave Gibbons) but ended up having to "spruce it up a bit."  Arguably, a lot of personality was then lost – including the little touch like breath marks, "foreign language" marks and the "dual captital I" (more on that later).

Another good reason is that because of its ubiquity, Comic Sans has a way of distracting from your work.  The best argument for this comes from artist Jason Brubaker, so I'll just quote him here:

Lettering is the one thing that people will stare directly at as they read your comic. Making it blend to your art is important. A badly chosen font will distract people from your work and story. Comic Sans will not only distract readers but get you hate mail. Good typography should be invisible. It shouldn’t call attention to itself unless there is a specific reason for it. Comic Sans will never be invisible because there is such a large group of people who hate it that you will most likely be hearing more comments about your font choice than anything else in your book.

I could go on and on about the hate that exists for this font, but at this point even the people just catching up from the top are getting the point: do not use Comic Sans.  You may as well roll a 1 on a D20; it's less painful.

Of course, that doesn't mean that you should be using Times New Roman, either.  And we'll get into that tomorrow.

Tomorrow: Fonts, Part 2 – Font Types and Their Use